Was he really a great painter?  A new generation is beginning to ask the question that we answered, once and for all as we thought, ten years ago.  Yes, of course, the douanier was—­a remarkable painter.  The man who influenced Derain, and to some extent Picasso, is not likely to have been less.  But a great painter?  For the present, at any rate, let us avoid great words.

In 1903, when first I lived in Paris, Rousseau appeared to be very much “in the movement.”  That was because by nature he was what thoughtful and highly trained artists were making themselves by an effort:  he was direct.  To us it seemed, in those days, that a mass of scientific irrelevancies and intellectual complications had come between the artist and his vision, and, again, between the vision and its expression.  In a desperately practical and well-organized age, which recognized objects by their labels and never dreamed of going beneath these to discover the things themselves, artists, we thought, were in danger of losing the very stuff of which visual art is made—­the direct, emotional reaction to the visible universe.  People had grown so familiar with the idea of a cup, with that purely intellectual label “cup,” that they never looked at a particular cup and felt its emotional significance.  Also, professional painters had provided themselves with a marvellous scientific apparatus for describing “the idea of a cup” in line and colour:  they had at their fingers’ ends a plastic notation that corresponded with the labels by which things are intellectually recognized.  They neither felt things nor expressed their feelings.  For even when an artist was capable of a direct, personal reaction it was almost impossible for him not to lose it in the cogs and chains of that elaborate machinery of scientific representation to which he had been apprenticed.  A determination to free artists from utilitarian vision and the disastrous science of representation was the theoretic basis of that movement which is associated with the name of Cezanne.

From the latter, at any rate, the douanier needed no freeing.  Such science as he acquired in the course of his life was a means to expressing himself and not to picture-making.  As for his vision, that was as direct and first-hand as the vision of a Primitive or a child; and to a Primitive his admirers were in the habit of likening him, to a child his detractors.  His admirers were right:  his art is not childish.  Primitives, because they are artists, have to grapple with the artistic problem.  They have, that is, to create form that will express an emotional conception; they have to express their sense of something they have seen and felt.  A child may well have an artistic vision; for all that, a child is never, or hardly ever, an artist.  It wrestles with no problem because it does not try to express anything.  It is a mere symbolist who uses a notation not to express what it feels but to convey information.  A child’s